Virtualization

Virtualization such as from VMWare has already had a considerable impact on IT infrastructures, which is only going to keep on growing helped by the numerous purposes for virtualiztion and new tech in the guise of competition from Microsoft - I'm very excited about Microsoft Virtualization, Hyper-V.
VMWare has been effectually unchallenged technically with their products and share of the market - but here comes a behemoth organisation with insight and inroads across the market from small-medium to corporations.

Here's a paper from Clabby(PDF) giving six reason why MS will overtake VMWare.

Using VMWare from the beginning due to being leading edge, and it can be said a lack of competition I've had a good relationship with them, they were innovative from the start in seeing a potential market. I hope VMWare will carry on and be just as inventive in the future.

 

Australian pc magazine has an ongoing four part series on server 2008 virtualisation which i've been reading with great interest.
There was a small write up about the university of canberra who have used hyper-v to go from 36 physical servers down to 2 physical servers running 18 virtual machines each which includes not only network services but the university's entire website and multimedia search engine. Impressive stuff.

 

It doesn't have to be put into layman's terms what benefit consolidation would be to a company with the savings that they would make - in this case it would be substantial, thousands of dollars.

Microsoft Virtualization

 

surely if you use 2 servers rather than 36 you are putting all your eggs in one basket?
if one server has a hardware issue 18 servers go offline.

 

Yeh that is a possible downside to it. They never mentioned what would happen in that scenario but no doubt they have some backup strategy to recover as quick as possible.

 

Have a look at some of the case studies from the MS link above.

 

Hello,
What about xen, kvm, openvz? How do they scale in this?
Don't forget that many linux servers run virtualized - on linux. So even if MS do come out with a handy solution, how well will they support non-MS guests?
Mrk

 

By cutting owner costs for one. Virtualization is not just for Windows, I can also add Q. xen, XenServer 64bit paravirtualization is very popular, solid and fast considered one of the better solutions.

Novell is a partner of Microsoft so of course you'd expect them to be working together on solutions - Interop, cross platform virtualization with SHIM a software layer enhancing hypervisor, Novell and MS SHIMs aiding performance for SUSE working on Hyper-V and Server2008 on xen.

 

I got a laptop with AMD-V support, so I was interested in utilizing Xen/Openvz/KVM.
It takes some time to figure out how to get it working, but Ubuntu has KVM built-in since their 2008-10 release.
That was the easiest and fastest approach.

KVM uses Qemu as front end and I was able to install Windows XP (both 32 and 64 bit) as client.
But I wasn't impressed with the responsiveness of Windows, it seems less than Virtualbox.
I also learned that a linux 64 bit host runs better than 32 bit on my laptop. Especially noticable with display drawing.
Maybe there is more to tweak in this hardware supported virtualization project, but I was a little disappointed.

 

I believe they have a very risky fail-over setup with networked, redundant storage which mitigates that risk somewhat.

2 servers down, ouch.

I wonder how much ram & proc on each of the servers, if you have link of the article please post, would be a good read.